The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College presents the exhibition Hotel Palenque is not in Yucatán

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY, October, 2014 - Hotel Palenque Is Not in Yucatán, is a multi-layered exhibition and architectural intervention curated by Montserrat Albores Gleason as the culmination of a three year curatorial fellowship at the Center for Curatorial Studies supported by the Jumex Foundation. Organized as part of an international curatorial conference to be held at CCS Bard from November 6^th -9^th, Hotel Palenque Is Not in Yucatán takes its starting point from the narrative in Robert Smithson’s famous Hotel Palenque (1969-72), a slide projection taken from a lecture originally delivered by the artist at the University of Utah.

The project in the Hessel Museum of Art consists of an exhibition and a pavilion (made in collaboration with Mexico City architects Pedro&Juana) that serves as the venue for a symposium organized by CCS Bard and the LUMA Foundation, as a classroom, a conference room, and a space for students, faculty and visitors to gather and unwind. 

Hotel Palenque Is Not in Yucatán is constructed as a fiction that re-narrates Smithson’s Hotel Palenque. It is built as the snake that bites its own tail, using Smithson’s piece as a gateway that allows the viewer to access a new narrative that denies linear progress, differentiation, history, and memory. The exhibition is constructed through the work of A.L. Steiner & Robbinschilds, Adriana Lara, Alex Hubbard, Luc Tuymans, Pablo Sigg, Pedro&Juana, Tania Pérez Córdova, Ulla Von Brandenburg, and a selection of Pre-Hispanic pieces from a private collection. Each of these artists, in their own fashion and removed from Smithson’s work, complicate the relations between circular time/progressive time, in-differentiation/differentiation, lack of memory/history, natural wonders/man-made wonder, etc. thus proposing a new set of values to occupy the “center”, creating a constant substitution of its elements; therefore erasing its boundaries and losing any possibility of locating it again.

Smithson’s original Hotel Palenque collapsed the conventions of travelogue, land art, and artist’s talk. The work culminated in an illustrated lecture presented to architecture students at the University of Utah in 1972, in which Smithson gave a deadpan structural analysis of the hotel where he, Nancy Holt, and Virginia Dwan stayed when visiting Chiapas in 1969. The hotel in question, a neighbor to the ruins of the Mayan city state Palenque, becomes a subject of jargon-filled architectural dissection: a contemporary ruin transported to the University of Utah via slide projection and Smithson’s voice. Hotel Palenque is not in Yucatán is an exercise in taking a physical and mental space—like the one Smithson imagined could be found in that hotel in the remote Chiapanecan jungle—and displacing it to the Center for Curatorial Studies in New York, thus replicating Smithson’s gesture of relocating both the Mayan site and the hotel to the University of Utah during his 1972 lecture.

Montserrat Albores Gleason is the 2012 - 2014 Jumex Curatorial Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, as well as a graduate of the center in 2006. Gleason studied visual arts at the ESMERALDA, Mexico City, before obtaining her M.A. In 2007 she began working as an independent curator while also co-founding the curatorial and research project PETRA in Mexico City. Among her exhibitions are: Elin Wikström’s first retrospective Rebecka espera, Åsa da y Sten aloja (2007) for the Museum SAPS, México City; Doppelgänger. The double of reality (2007), for the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vigo, Spain; Misfeasance? (2009), for the Museum of Art Raúl Anguiano in Guadalajara, México; and recently Lynne Cooke: 3 shows, presented at Petra, México City and at Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn. Since 2011 she has been collaborating with the artist Jorge Pardo, developing the discussion series for his latest piece Tecoh (a site specific project in The Yucatan, Mexico). Albores writes for ArtForum.com and is the author of Misfeasance?, the first publication of her recently founded editorial project Frédéric.

This exhibition was made possible by Jumex Foundation and LUMA Foundation.

Also on view November 6 - December 19 at CCS Bard is Spectres, an ongoing project of Belgian artist Sven Augustijnen. Spectres revisits one of the most shameful events of European colonial history: the abduction, torture, and execution of Patrice Lumumba, the first elected Prime Minister of independent Congo.  This project consists of a film of the same name, to be shown in the video gallery concurrently with archival elements of this expansive research project, including various literature and publications, posters, and artifacts, shown throughout the public spaces and library of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

The CCS Bard Galleries and Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College are open Thursday through Sunday from 11:00a.m. to 6:00 p.m. All CCS Bard exhibitions and public programs are free and open to the public.

About the Center for Curatorial Studies
The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) was founded in 1990 as an exhibition and research center for the study of late twentieth-century and contemporary art and culture and to explore experimental approaches to the presentation of these topics and their impact on our world. Since 1994, the Center for Curatorial Studies and its graduate program have provided one of the world’s most forward thinking teaching and learning environments for the research and practice of contemporary art and curatorship. Broadly interdisciplinary, CCS Bard encourages students, faculty and researchers to question the critical and political dimension of art, its mediation and its social significance. CCS Bard cultivates innovative thinking, radical research and new ways to challenge our understanding of the social and civic values of the visual arts. CCS Bard provides an intensive educational program alongside its public events, exhibitions, and publications, which collectively explore the critical potential of the institutions and practices of exhibition-making. It is uniquely positioned within the larger Center’s tripartite resources, which include the internationally renowned CCS Bard Library and Archives and the Hessel Museum of Art, with its rich permanent collection.

General information on the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College can be found on its website at: www.bard.edu/ccs.

# # #

MEDIA CONTACTS:

For further information, images or to arrange interviews, please contact:

BARD COLLEGE CONTACT:

Mark Primoff

Director of Communications

Tel: +1 845.758.7412      

Email: [email protected]                   

CCS BARD CONTACT:

Ramona Rosenberg

Director of External Affairs

Tel: +1 (845) 758-7574

Email: [email protected] 

This event was last updated on 10-21-2014

Back to Top